A Fundamental Concept for Quality Management

Dr. Joseph M. Juran taught that quality management used the same three processes as financial management. They are:

• Quality Planning
• Quality Control
• Quality Improvement

Quality Management – Quality Planning

Of the three elements, inadequate quality planning is a major source of quality deficiencies. Many of the remedies for quality improvement projects consist of re-planning quality. The best way to deal with poor quality is to prevent it in the first place. The earlier in the process a cause of poor quality can be removed the lower the cost to the company.

Quality Management – Quality Control

In creating quality control it is important to choose what to control, establish a unit of measurement, establish performance standards, measure performance, interpret the difference between actual versus the standard, take action on the difference. This is similar to Dr. Deming’s Plan-Do-check-Act cycle.http://technacon.com/category/dr-w-edward-deming

Quality Management – Quality Improvement

Improvement is created on a project by project basis. The first step is to identify specific projects, organize teams, discover causes, develop remedies, prove the effectiveness of the remedies, deal with cultural resistance, and establish controls to the hold the gains.

Quality Management – Return on Investment

As a rough rule of thumb, the average improvement project is worth $100,000 per year in decrease waste/cost while the average one-time cost is approximately $10,000-20,000.

Quality Management – Lessons learned

Some of the lessons learn through applying quality improvement projects are:

• The return on investment in quality improvement is among the highest available to managers and quality improvement is not capital intensive.
• The most decisive factor in the race for quality leadership is the rate of quality improvement

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Quality Management follows the same basic principles as financial management, has a high return on investment and a low capital investment requirement.